Come on Nissan! Only 40 LEAF Electric Cars Available in Canada this Year

Photo: Flickr, CCNow You're Just Teasing Us...While the all-electric Nissan LEAF has apparently been selling thousands of units in the US and Japan, it looks like the July 2011 launch in Canada was mostly a paper launch. In a press release, Nissan revealed that their inventory of 2011 LEAFs for the country was all of 40 cars (4 per province?). Unless that's a typo or a misunderstanding, it seems pretty ridiculous. Hopefully a real, full-volume launch will take place in 2012 for Canadian electron-fans.

Photo: Michael Graham Richard

Here is the official word form Nissan. Note that they're expecting to bring 600 LEAFs to Canada in 2012 (still a small number, but better than 40):

"Response from Canadians since we first revealed the Nissan LEAF in 2009 has been astounding so we're not surprised that our first inventory of 40 model year '11 cars were snapped up so quickly," said Judy Wheeler, Director of Marketing, Nissan Canada, Inc. "We expect this momentum to continue when we reopen reservations for model year '12 cars in the coming month, so keep your eyes open for more and more Nissan LEAFs driving around Canadians cities soon."

Delivery to the first wave of consumers will begin in September and continue into the fall. Nissan is carefully managing the purchase process from the first step, when consumers sign up on www.nissan.ca/leaf, until the customer drives the Nissan LEAF home and plugs it into a personal charging dock. Through Model Year 12, Nissan expects to release around 600 Nissan Leaf on the Canadian market through several waves of reservations into next year.